Sonia Sato
History Sonia Sato: 1983 - 2002 Yoshio Sato was a traditional assassin the Yakuza had contracted from the League of Assassins. He was an exceptional assassin but not without honor. Yoshio's reputation and skill allowed him to apply a code to the contracts he would accept, thereby removing the need to ever harm a woman or child. It was because of this code, he ended up with a daughter he would claim as his own. Due to a client's strong desire to have Yoshio's uncanny ability, he had deceived Yoshio into accepting a deal under false pretenses. Yoshio had been hired to attack a convoy which he was told would be transporting a politician. When Yoshio immobilized the convoy and took out its guards, he approached the armored transport and executed his primary target, not realizing that there was a two-year-old girl was in the backseat beside him. Startled by the toddler's cries and pumped full of adrenaline, Yoshio put the girl in the crosshairs of his gun and nearly pulled the trigger. Mortified that he had nearly broken his code, Yoshio panicked and took the girl and the girl's diaper bag with him. Safe at his hideout and looking for supplies to change the girl's diaper, Yoshio discovered paperwork revealing the girl had tested positive for a strange genetic sequence. The child was not the politician's daughter at all, but in fact, a child who had been taken away from her parents by government officials. Furthermore, the girl was being forcibly studied and experimented on as the genetic sequence was theorized to be capable of producing powers. When the Yakuza arrived to pay Yoshio the remainder of his payment, Yoshio discovered they had not only known about the girl, but she was, in fact, the actual target. The Yakuza had intentionally omitted that information from Yoshio as they knew he would never accept a contract that put a child at risk. They knew he would kidnap her to avoid being identified by her. The Yakuza offered to double Yoshio's payment as an apology if he agreed to give them the girl to do with as they pleased, but Yoshio had a counteroffer. Yoshio killed them all. Yoshio knew he would never be allowed to return to the League after killing members of one of its biggest clients, so he fled, taking the girl with him. Yoshio fled to the steppes of Russia and found a remote village to settle in. Yoshio lived the life of a simple automotive mechanic. He named the girl Sonia and raised her as his own. As the girl grew old, she began to show signs of the deep-rooted trauma caused by the incident she had witnessed and Yoshio knew no other way to help her than to give her the training forced upon him when he himself was taken in by the League of Assassins after witnessing his father and mother's brutal murders. By the time she was a teenager, Sonia's powers began to develop on their own, not having a need to be forced through experimentation. These powers created some sort of kinetic dampening field inside Sonia's aura whenever her adrenaline kicked in. This caused punches and projectiles to slow as they neared her, even diverting them off-course. In addition, Sonia learned to briefly harden the field in order to extend her reach, allowing her to effectively punch someone just out of her range or push/pull nearby objects. These gifts served her well when the League of Assassins finally found Yoshio and sought to exterminate him. As the hit squad was unprepared for Sonia's abilities, she was able to catch them off-guard and gave them a chance to escape. Again on the run, the Satos called upon the last of Yoshio's owed favors to get them into the United States. Seeking the government's protection, Sonia convinced her father to give the DEO the research notes he had taken from the armored convoy. The DEO agents assigned to handle the Satos' case were Jonni Thunder and Hadley Jagger. Judomaster: 2002 - Present Despite the DEO offering their protection of the Satos in exchange for the documentation and Sonia's willingness to allow them to run limited experiments on her own abilities and genetics in order to help the DEO better understand the metahuman condition, Yoshio began to slip into a mental decline. Depressed from his guilt, paranoid the League would find him or Sonia despite the DEO's protection, suffering from early signs of Alzheimer's disease, and reduced to an alcoholic to cope with it all, Yoshio confronted Sonia one day about it all. She thought she had assured him it would be all right and she left it at that when he agreed. Sonia came back from meeting with her handlers and found her father had prepared a traditional ritual for seppuku. Horrified, Sonia was unable to act or protest before Yoshio ran his dagger into his abdomen and dragged it across his belly. With his dying breath, he apologized for what he had done, assured her that this was the only way she would ever be safe, and begged that Sonia forgive him for this. Sonia was about to take the prepared sword to grant her father a merciful death but then noticed the audience around them. Ra's al Ghul, his daughters, and several of his inner circle were present in their living room. Sonia looked back at the blade her father had cut himself with, the mat on which he was kneeling, and the sword in her hand. All of them bore the League's markings. The League had found them and Yoshio had brokered a deal to keep Sonia safe. Ra's al Ghul had David Cain step forward to take the sword from Sonia, telling her that her father deserved a slow death. Sonia denied Ra's the pleasure of watching her father die painfully. Still, Ra's smirked when he sent Cain to collect the former assassin's head. Ra's promised Sonia that he would keep his part of the bargain. He assured Sonia that she was safe despite the assassins she had killed in Russia while fleeing. Ra's even wished her luck in her future endeavors and then he and his followers left Sonia for the DEO handlers to find, hours later and tearfully clinging to her father's headless body. With little prospects, Sonia agreed to work for the DEO. After initial training, she was assigned to her former handler, Hadley Jagger, for field training. She worked with him for three years before he was killed in the line of duty when he was caught in Gotham during the initial days of the Cataclysm. Sonia had been injured in the earthquake and Jagger sacrificed his seat on the DEO helicopter to allow Sonia to be medically evacuated. Jagger then responded to the GCPD when it was assaulted by armed combatants. Sonia watched on live television as the assassin Abaddon executed Jagger while calling the Batman out to confront him on the GCPD rooftop. After recovering from that ordeal, Sonia was reassigned to work with Special Agents Sargent Steel and Christopher Smith as part of a special task force meant to be the liaisons to a new Justice League of America break-away team founded by the Question and Captain Atom. The team didn't pan out, and Sonia decided she needed to take a break from the DEO. When he heard of her desire to quit, Director Bones requested an audience with Sato. To her surprise, he didn't try to talk her out of quitting but he did offer her a new opportunity. Bones asked her to join the Society as the replacement for Hadley Jagger, offering her the mantle he once wore as Judomaster. Sonia was not really sure what to make of all this, but she had always trusted Bones and agreed to try this out. In order to provide her a plausible cover, Bones arranged for Sonia to go work for billionaire Wesley Dodds as his private bodyguard. Not only could Wesley's psychic training help Sonia better master her own psychic abilities, but Sonia could protect Dodds from harm. You see, Wesley had meant a great deal to the Society and the Society had wanted to keep him at all times as he continued to make himself more of a prominent public figure. In addition to the risks he took in broad daylight, Dodds had already begun his crimefighting career as Sandman, but had little success mostly due to his lack of a partner. Sonia pointed out that even the Batman had someone to watch his back and so Wesley agreed to fashion Sonia a costume of her own. Sonia also convinced Wesley to try a different approach with their crimefighting, citing the success her and Jagger had with their undercover operations, posing as alien weapons traffickers in order to infiltrate drug cartels and groups of meta-criminals. By posing as criminals themselves and relying on the side-effects Sandman's gas had on criminals' memory, Sandman and Judomaster were able to take down one criminal enterprise after another and all the while allowing their reputation in the underworld to grow as no one remembered that Sandman and Judomaster had been the ones behind their downfall and just assuming Batman or the Birds of Prey had been the vigilantes responsible for their capture. Threat Assessment Resources * Telekinetic Dispersal Field: Sonia's metahuman talent allows her to project a telekinetic dispersal field whenever her adrenaline is triggered. This force turns her aura into both a physical defense mechanism as well as a weapon. Punches, kicks, and projectiles are thrown off-course by this dispersal field, usually diverting them from Sonia entirely and at the very least slowing them down and dampening their power. A standard bullet fire straight at her body's center mass would graze her arm for instance and anything less than that would miss completely. A bullet with an enhanced velocity or other more advanced weaponry, such as a rail gun, would have its power lessened to hit like a more conventional weapon. Projectiles without actual physical mass, such as some energy-based weaponry would not be affected in any significant manner. ** Telekinetic Perception: Sonia has developed a passive extension of her dispersal field wherein she can use her aura to 'feel' things around her, giving her a heightened awareness of her surroundings and the ability to 'see' in 360-degrees within a six-foot-radius around her at all times. * Peak Human Condition: Through intense training, specialized diet, and biofeedback treatments, Sonia Sato represents the pinnacle of human physical prowess. Her physical attributes exceed that of an average Olympic level athlete. Her Strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes, and coordination are all at peak, or near-peak, perfection. * Martial Arts: Sonia Sato is an expert in multiple martial arts. Despite her title of Judomaster, Sato does not solely rely on that style of fighting. Her primary form of combat is an idiosyncratic admixture of Judo, Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Jujitsu, Aikido, and Capoeira. According to Black Canary, after the Birds had encountered Sandman and Judomaster at an arms deal (and not then familiar with how Sandman and Judomaster operated), Sato is "as skilled as any (she has) encountered before... even Shiva." For the record, Dinah claims that fight as a victory as Judomaster fled while Dinah was caught off-guard by Sandman delivering a high-speed gas pellet to the back of her head. * Weaponry: Sonia is an expert in nearly all forms of close-quarters weaponry, as well as most firearms. Her preferred weapons are a pair of sai and multiple kunai which she keeps on her person as Judomaster. * Driving: Sonia usually drives the Nightmare, Sandman's souped-up armored and weaponized muscle car, and has proven herself an exceptional driver due to her heightened reflexes and steady nerves. Wesley also owns a private collection of many cars, motorbikes, trucks, boats, and aircraft, all of which Sonia has trained on to expert effect. * Mechanics: Sonia is a truly exceptional automotive mechanic. She claims that her heightened awareness is the reason for this as she has a preternatural ability to understand exactly how things fit together and can 'see' inside the parts without any special instrumentation. Through great focus, she can even use her aura to tighten and loosen bolts with her aura alone, with all the torque of a power tool. She has used this in the past to disable the engine of a moving automobile while is was clinging to its hood, thereby stopping the vehicle and allowing her to beat its occupants into submission. * Specified Toxin Immunity: Using techniques her father had learned in the League of Assassins, Sonia has exposed herself to all of Sandman's concoctions and by using bio-feedback techniques, has trained her body to develop an immunity to each and every one, allowing her to operate in thick clouds of the toxins without ill-effect. In fact, even if the cloud is so thick to impair visibility, Sonia can just 'flex' her dispersal field and scattered the cloud away from her. Note: Sonia's immunity only pertains to the toxins which she has specifically trained her body to counter against. While she may be more resistant to other toxins as a result of this training, she is not immune to those which she has not trained her body to counter. This is intentional as Sonia does fear the day that her life will be in peril and she will be unable to partake in a life-saving medication due to this resistance. Weaknesses * Ambush: As her telekinetic dispersal field requires her adrenaline to activate, Sonia is most vulnerable when caught unaware. * High-Powered Weaponry: Advancements in technology have offered a frightening number of weapons capable of compromising Sonia's dispersal field. * Migraines: As her psychic power is rather limited and defined, Sonia does not suffer from intense migraines as often as more powerful psychics might, but she does still run the risk of becoming disabled or impaired if she is especially stressed or unable to regularly take her medication. * League of Assassins: Sonia hates the League of Assassins with a blinding rage. She acknowledges that she is emotionally compromised when it comes to matters dealing with them and prone to flying off the handle when confronted by them unexpectedly, particularly if she were to encounter the Swiss, Bane, or Ra's al Ghul himself. She even once put a kunai in the shoulder of Red Hood just for admitting his past as the assassin Dumah. I fear what she may do if she learned of others' past involvement with the League of Assassins.Deluxe Oracle File: Sonia Sato Trivia and Notes Notes * Sonia's civilian outfit is a nod to her comic book costume. * Judomaster's outfit is a nod to Kato from Green Hornet. Links and References * Appearances of Sonia Sato * Character Gallery: Sonia Sato Category:Characters Category:Extreme Justice Members Category:DEO Category:The Society Members Category:Metahuman Category:Sandman & Judomaster Category:Martial Arts Category:Japanese Category:Gothamite Category:Bodyguards Category:Peak Human Condition Category:Force Field Category:Driving Category:Female Characters Category:Height 5' 7" Category:27th Reality